This article from PEOPLE MAGAZINE
special double issue
December 27, 1976 - January 3, 1977

A VAGABOND
GROWS UP AS
COUNTRY ROCK'S
FIRST LADY

If the lady comes on variously as Moonbeam McSwine, Lolita and Little Orphan Annie
- or all three - it's only because Linda Ronstadt resists categories.
Like Oscar Wilde at the customs office, Ronstadt has nothing to declare but her talent.
With her third straight platinum album, three hit singles, a smash European tour
and the inevitable Greatest Hits LP at Christmas already gold, Linda is outgrowing
her sex-kitten image. But growing into what? She won a "Rocky" as female singer of the
year at Don Kirshner's schlock Rock Music Awards. Yet she also copped her first Grammy
as best female country singer, beating out her idol and sometime session sister Dolly Parton.

The explanation is country rock, the L.A.-based hybrid that Ronstadt, 30,
has helped make the dominant new pop genre of the decade. She is surrounded by evidence
of her success. Her former backup band spun into a monster act of its own, the Eagles.
Politicians like Jerry Brown and Tom Hayden sought her out for fund-raisers.
And for the first time since the hardware merchant's daughter split Tucson at 18,
Linda is, as she puts it tentatively, "kind of settled down for the time being."
She's unpacked her records in a $225,000 beach house in Malibu and has severed her
occasional reliance on both drugs and the mentor-lovers she once carelessly appended
to her career. "Nine months, and still not a man in sight," she boasts.
(Her last was comedian Albert Brooks.)

Linda has conquered her television terror (her career would be even
bigger if she did TV regularly) with a guest shot on Dolly Parton's syndicated series.
Recently Linda's musical eclecticism has been spreading to jazz. But the infallible
sign of Linda's crossover into self-confidence is that, after
recording songs by everyone from Buddy Holly to Smokey Robinson,
she finally collaborated on two of her own on her Hasten Down the Wind LP.
"I'm not a writer and never will be," she says, "but there's no harm in trying
to come up with something and throwing it on the wall to see if it sticks."